I was still working my 9 to 5 job and I still had to take care of personal matters while I was managing this business, but that’s life.

And in life, you don’t need to be a genius to succeed. Heck, I’m certainly not.

You just need to make sure that you put the work in.

This case study will detail all of the work that I did to take this business from nothing into a successful dropshipping store. Everything from building the store, to launch day, to my first marketing campaigns, to my first sale. It’s all in here.

Okay, ready to find out how I made $8,873 in 31 days by dropshipping? Let’s go!

A Proper Goal

After all, if you don’t have a goal, how do you know if you’re succeeding?

With that in mind, I decided that I wanted to use S.M.A.R.T. goals to keep track of my progress, and they really helped to keep me motivated throughout this project.

One of the goals for this new business was to prove that dropshipping is, and always will be, a real and sustainable business model for entrepreneurs who want to start an online business.

But, of course, the main goal that I needed to set myself was a revenue goal.

I decided that I wanted to make more money than I did with the previous case study (when I made $6,667 in revenue) and achieve that in a shorter time frame.

I also decided that I’d aim for a returning customer rate of at least 5%, as this would be a great way to measure customer satisfaction.

And finally, I wanted to achieve a conversion rate of 4%. This meant that four out of every 100 visitors to my store would need to become paying customers. This was probably the hardest goal I set for myself, especially considering that the average conversion rate of an ecommerce business is only 2%.

After setting my goals I was so excited for this new adventure!

What To Sell

Anybody who is starting an ecommerce business has probably asked “What should I sell?” at least once.

It’s one of the biggest concerns for new dropshippers, and some might jump to the assumption that you need to find trending products to succeed.

This isn’t necessarily true.

Trending products can definitely help you on your journey, but they won’t decide the fate of your business alone.

I actually have some personal requirements that I look for in a product that I’m going to be dropshipping.

So, I had the framework down for choosing my products, but I didn’t really know what exactly I wanted to sell just yet.

Instead of doing all the hard work myself, I simply took advantage of resources that everybody has access to: Oberlo’s blog, specifically the “What to Sell” section, and the Oberlo YouTube channel.

Product research can take a long time, and that was time that I didn’t have, so I decided to make a quick decision.

After browsing through a few articles, it finally hit me. I knew what I wanted to sell.

Fashion sunglasses.

People are always looking to buy new sunglasses – there’s always somewhere on earth where the sun is shining.

And that means that there’s always going to be demand for sunglasses.

Ordering Products for Quality Assurance

I was running a dropshipping business, which meant that my suppliers would ship their products directly to my customers. I wouldn’t ever see them.

This is great on one the hand, because I’d never need to worry about handling inventory or shipping orders. But on the other hand, I was trying to build a brand, so quality assurance is a necessity.

In fact, I cannotstress how important test orders are.

Low-quality products from unreliable suppliers is a big no-go for dropshippers.

And you, the business owner, have a responsibility to know what it’s like to receive the products that you’re actually selling.

So I ordered product samples and verified the product quality myself.

I wanted to get the full experience that my customers would have when they received my products.

Simply looking at product images online isn’t enough to ensure that the product quality is high. I needed to see the products, in person.

After ordering products – the same ones that I’d be selling at my store – I was really happy with their quality, so I decided to focus on another part of my new business: branding.

It can take years of hard work to establish an unforgettable brand.

I only had four weeks to run this store, but I still wanted to show you how you can build a brand for your dropshipping business.

So, I started off with an important part of every brand – the business name.

Choosing A Business Name

The name of your business really is important – if you choose a catchy one, it’ll leave a lasting impression on your audience.

But, it shouldn’t just sound great. I also try to make sure that I choose a name which has the .com domain name available.

My goal was to find two (or more) words which I could blend together to make my business name.

After a couple of minutes, I came up with the name “Sunyez”.

I decided on this because it was a different spelling for “sunnies,” which is a slang term for “sunglasses.”

I looked up “Sunyez” on the WIPO Global Brand Database to make sure I wouldn’t run into any legal issues – there were no entries for this name, so I moved forward.

Luckily, sunyez.com was still available. So, I bought the domain and jumped into the next part: creating a business logo.

Business Logo

I have basic Adobe Photoshop skills, but I didn’t want to create a logo for my business – I’m just not as good as a professional.

So, I hired a freelance web designer on Fiverr to help me create the logo for my store.

After receiving a short description of what my business was, and the expectations that I had for the design, they got to work.

I received my final design two days later.

I wasn’t thrilled with the result, but I didn’t want to spend more money or time on a new logo. I decided to keep it with slight changes.

I accepted that this is my first mistake while running this business. I should’ve provided clearer instructions. Fortunately, this could be fixed easily.

Although the logo had the color gradient I wanted, I changed it to an orange tone instead.

In the end, this became the final logo:

Now that the business name and logo were done, it was time to move onto the next step:

Building my Shopify store.

Building My Shopify Store

One of the many great things about Shopify is that you don’t need to be a web designer to create your own stunning online store.

Instead, you can just use a theme (free or paid) to lay the foundation for your store. Themes are pre-designed templates which you can add to your store with just a few clicks – they’re also customizable so you can add your own personal touch.

After doing a little bit of browsing, I decided that I’d purchase a Shopify theme called “Symmetry” for $180. I picked this specific theme because it allowed me to create visual sections which were aligned with my goal of building a brand.

Remember: ecommerce is all about creating an amazing shopping experience. I want my future customers to have fun browsing and shopping on my store

Store Design

The very first step I took after choosing my theme was designing the homepage.

I focused on everything “above the fold,” meaning everything you see before you scroll down the page.

Usually, ecommerce stores have a hero image or slider above the fold, and then place their products below the fold – this means that customers will need to scroll down to see them.

I was looking for the opposite.

Everything above the fold is prime real estate, so I focused on optimizing for that.

If you visited my Shopify store in the first few days, you would’ve seen this:

The problem was – I had zero data. I didn’t know which products would make the most sense to put at the top of the page.

So, I took a guess and chose products that matched the color scheme of my hero image:

Designing Product Pages

When designing my product page, I wanted it to have the same look and feel as I was creating for my brand.

From the colors to the wording, there needed to be a sense of consistency.

Without knowing who my actual target audience was at that point, I could only make assumptions about what kind of style my potential customers might like.

To get more data about my product pages, I created two different styles.

The first was very simple and only included the necessary product information. Meanwhile, the second one had much snappier copy.

Can you guess which version performed better?

Trick question.

At the end of this four week case study, there was no clear winner. Both styles converted well, which proves that there are many different ways to make your product pages work.

Shopify Apps

There are a bunch of apps which helped me on my way.

At the end of this case study, I used a total of six Shopify apps on my store.

When working with longer product pages, the “add to cart” button disappears, and this may result in customers dropping off. Like the name says, an add to cart button will be always visible on the side of the page.

But the most important thing that I gained from this was the confidence that there were people who had an honest interest in my business.

Also, I got an email address to add to my mailing list!

So, I took a gamble and sent an abandoned cart email to the only member on my mailing list with a 50% discount code, and ka-ching! – a few minutes later I got my first sale!

The feeling of making my first sale is something I will always cherish.

It’s one of the most exciting and satisfying feelings that an ecommerce entrepreneur can experience.

But it’s important to remember that there’s still a long way to go. This is just the first step on the moon.

And since abandoned cart emails just brought me my first sale, I headed over to my email provider to optimize them.

Abandoned Cart Emails

Let’s start this section off with a small quiz:

Who’s more likely to purchase a product from your store?

A first-time visitor.

A visitor who already put a product into the cart but dropped off before checkout.

You guessed it, it’s B – the person who nearly became a customer.

And it’s important to remember that there are so many reasons why somebody could drop off at the checkout process, but you’ll never know what the actual reason is.

That’s why it’s important to follow up with everybody who didn’t complete their checkout process.

So, as my Shopify store was already connected to my email provider so I could easily set up a sequence of three emails with the aim of recovering those customers.

My setup looked like this:

Email #1

Trigger: 1 day after somebody abandoned the cart

Subject: What Would Your Mom Say?

I tried to keep this email fun without trying to sell too hard.

Email #2

Trigger: 3 days after somebody abandoned their cart and previous email was sent

Subject: Would Your Mom Still Love You?

Email number two included a slightly more aggressive approach. I also added a 50% discount to push for sale this time.

Email #3

Trigger: 5 days after somebody abandoned their cart and previous email was sent

Subject: We Are Not Angry…

Except from the mom cliché, email number three was just a simple sales email. I just pitched a 50% discount + free shipping offer.

I pushed pretty hard with that email because it was my last chance to turn the website visitor into a paying customer.

Subject lines are always great for A/B split-tests – use them to find out what works and what doesn’t for your business.

Overall, I was very happy with how these turned out.

Giveaway Marketing

I decided to run a giveaway to try and bring in more people to my store, and ultimately generate more sales.

This would a) provide my audience with a ton of value, and b) help me to acquire emails that I could target later on with marketing campaigns.

However, I only really had limited knowledge about how giveaways work, so I wanted to perform some research into the tactics other entrepreneurs used to find success.

I found that AppSumo had some incredible success with viral giveaways, so they seemed to be the right people to learn from.

I read an ebook by Chris Von Wilpert about AppSumo’s success, and my three main takeaways were:

Find a great product I could give away

Set the giveaway up

Promote my giveaway to interested people

Step One: Find a Great Product to Give Away

This step was crucial – maybe even the most important part of the whole giveaway.

As my goal for this giveaway was to collect leads for potential customers, I didn’t want to give away something that didn’t reflect my brand.

Also, I didn’t want to go too broad with the product that I chose, in case I attracted the wrong type of people. If I gave away a $100 Amazon gift card or something similar, literally anybody could enter without the slightest interest in my business or my niche.

Obviously, I couldn’t give away a product from a competitor, either.

The requirements were tough, but I took advantage of my secret weapon – my girlfriend.

Together we went through all of her recent purchases that cost less than $200 and found something which would be perfect.

Rose Gold Makeup Brushes

My girlfriend had recently bought a makeup brush set for around $145 at a local mall. She instantly fell in love with it.

Even better: her friends were actually jealous when she showed the product to them.

I also knew that her friends could fit my target audience criteria, so it looked like we’d just found an amazing product to give away.

My hopes were high on this one so it was time for step two: the set up!

Step Two: Setting Up My Giveaway

Let me be clear: I can’t write a single line of code.

But I can use tools.

So I needed to find a tool which would allow me to easily set up this giveaway.

Also, I needed to make sure that the tool made it super easy to enter and to share my giveaway.

The brand promoter entry played a huge role in this giveaways success, so we’ll be talking about it later in-depth.

The Giveaway

Within only a few minutes I had set up the giveaway and was ready to start promoting it.

Step Three: Promoting My Giveaway

“The better the product is that you’re giving away, the less marketing you need to do.”

That’s one of the key points of Chris’ ebook.

However, it’s important to remember that you still need to do some marketing.

To get things off the ground, I had to get this giveaway in front of the right people.

I wanted to keep things simple, so I just posted this giveaway (with the permission of the admins) in three fashion Facebook groups:

And I created a simple pop-up on my Shopify store which appeared whenever someone was about to leave the website.

I did nothing more to market this giveaway. The rest was up to the people who were about to enter.

I had a feeling that this product would help me to attract a large audience.

Women from all over the world could be interested in this, so I saw no reason why they wouldn’t also share this giveaway to earn more entries.

But I had no idea how right I actually was…

The Giveaway Result

So, how did the giveaway go?

Incredible.

Over the duration of this 14-day giveaway, I collected 556 email addresses from interested people.

The best part was that 270 out of the 556 entries were referred by somebody else.

Somebody even referred 51 people!

I had to pay $145 for the giveaways prize, which meant that I gained the email address of potential customers for just $0.26 a piece.

I also mentioned earlier that if people choose to become a brand promoter, they’d receive 15 bonus entries. This was the real catalyst for the giveaway’s success.

At the end of the giveaway I had also generated 29 sales, which made me $918.76 in revenue.

Of course, these sales came from people gaining interest in my brand after they entered the giveaway.

In the end, this giveaway yielded a huge return on investment, and I hadn’t even started to use the emails yet!

So, overall this marketing campaign was a huge success. Next it was time to try my hand at Facebook Advertising.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads can have a huge impact on your business.

In fact, it’s one of the few marketing channels that is sustainable and scalable for businesses over a long period of time.

But it’s not easy.

It’s actually rare that a new business will turn a profit with Facebook ads straightaway.

Most of the time, you need to spend some cash to get data, so you can better optimize your ads.

And, of course, this can eat up a lot of your budget. So, it’s always a good idea to try out multiple channels at once.

But once you create that winning Facebook ad… it’s a game changer.

Facebook Ads: The Starting Point

One of the main benefits that Facebook advertising brings is interest-based targeting.

Essentially, if you know what your target audience is interested in, you’re likely to be able to reach them with your campaigns.

I knew I had to take advantage of this.

In the past I’d developed a tactic which helps me when I’m getting started with a business.

All I needed was at least one customer. Luckily, I already had some from the Instagram direct messages and the giveaway.

So, all I had to do was look up a customer through Instagram (or any other social network) and check who they were following.

I was specifically looking for verified pages – the ones with a blue tick next to their name. These tend to be brand, influencers, or public figures.

So, I simply wrote down all the verified pages that my customers were following.

But, why?

Well, Facebook lets you target people who “like” certain pages on Facebook.

That means I could use the verified pages that I found my customers were following as the foundation for my ads targeting.

The only additional information I had about my customers were their gender and the countries they lived in.

It didn’t really make sense to optimize my ads on this information yet, so I left it pretty broad.

Here’s what my first ad audience looked like:

From now on, we’ll refer to this audience as the “base audience”.

Facebook Ads: The Ad Funnel

Okay, so I had my audience sorted for now.

Next, I decided to build a very simple ad funnel.

It went like this:

Target the whole audience and aim for “content views”

Re-target content viewers and aim for “add to cart” and/or “purchase”

Additionally, I tested several other metrics within the ads like

Audiences (countries, age, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences)

Offers (discounts, free shipping, and missed deals)

Designs (fonts, colors, style, and stock images)

Copywriting (wording, friendly, or provocative)

Styles (images and videos)

All of my ads had one common goal: to gather data.

I wanted to get as much information as possible in the shortest period of time so I could start optimizing my ads.

All of my early efforts with Facebook advertising were mainly focused on part one of the ad funnel: content views.

Not just because it would’ve helped me with my branding efforts, but also because I’d gain a pool of people who already heard about my business.

This would help me to get more sales in the long run.

Facebook Ads: The First Ads

My very first Facebook ads looked like this:

It was an A/B split test with two different call-to-action buttons. The rest was the same. I wanted to figure out what kind of ad would bring more customers to my landing page. All the ad links directed customers to the same product page.

I simply took this free image from Burst, edited it a little bit in Adobe Photoshop, and set up the ad.

Budget-wise, I started with a $20 daily budget ($10 for each ad) for a duration of five days. In the end, I stopped the ad earlier and only spent $39.52 in total.

Can you guess which ad won this first split test?

Neither. They both performed pretty badly.

I just couldn’t attract anyone to click on it. They ran for two days and gave me no information at all.

Facebook Ads: Collecting Data

Once I realized that those two ads weren’t working, I came up with six different ad campaigns.

This was to help me collect data, fast.

The main goal remained the same: view content.

I actually just took my “base audience”, set a metric that I wanted to test for each campaign, created the ad, and launched.

This was was set up to test my audience. I took my base audience and created two more variants out of it so. I had a total of three audiences now:

Base audience including locations: USA, Canada, UK, Australia

Base audience including locations: USA, Canada

Base audience excluding: USA, Canada, UK, Australia

I tried to keep the budget low at $15 per day. This was split with $5 per ad per day.

The aim was to run these ads over a period of seven days, knowing that I’d need to spend $105 in total.

However, I began to get data and it was clear who would win in the end, so I stopped this ad earlier.

In total I only spent $27.10.

My winner was the “Base audience including: USA, Canada” ad. This meant that I’d gotten the first real piece of data in the bank.

I wasn’t aiming for sales right now – I was aiming for data. And that’s what I got.

I launched a few more campaign to test different messages, different designs, and so on.

I hadn’t found a sweet spot yet, but I was much better equipped to tackle Facebook advertising from here on out.

Let me show you how the next Facebook ad took me to the next level.

The Big Success

Let me start with the results first:

Content views: 1,240

Cost per content view: $0.13

Duration: eight days

Link clicks: 2,196 link clicks

Total ad cost: $159.98

This data alone wasn’t that impressive, but it gave me an idea in which kind of direction I should take with my ads.

I came up with the copy for this ad using the language research that I did to get to know my customers better.

I testedtwo different kind of ads with this one:

The offer broke down into percentage

The offer broke down into the actual saving in dollars

The winner of this split test was the ad on the left side, the percentage offer.

Savings in percentage seems more attractive to my target audience than the raw savings in dollars.

Also, this was the product page people landed on when they clicked on the link in the ad:

This ad was definitely a turning point for my whole business.

I was all-in. I had already experimented a lot. I had lost more money than I had made, and I didn’t have much time to achieve the goal I set for myself.

But it definitely wasn’t over yet!

Facebook Ads: Optimizing Everything!

Everything about my business was far from perfection.

Realizing this was vital.

Ultimately, it’s this realization which helped me to build a profitable online store.

Whether it was through a recovery email or a giveaway discount code, my Shopify store had already made some sales.

And if there are people who give you their money even though your business is not perfect (or even great), you’re doing something right.

If you continue to do a few more things right, you can continue to grow your sales.

To make this happen I needed to optimize.

Optimization Part 1: The Website

The pages that people land on when they’re clicking on Facebook ads are equally, if not more, important than the ad itself.

If somebody loves your visual ads, but they click to find a poorly-made website, they’re likely to leave your store without making a purchase.

That means wasted ad spend.

So, everything from the product images to the product description had to be great.

And my store was anything but perfect.

I had so much room to improve, and this really boosted my confidence.

The first thing I tried to optimize was the landing page.

I wanted the product descriptions to tell a story, so I started to write down multiple versions and came up with one I felt good about.

The only problem was… it was a bit too long. Now people had to scroll down to read everything.

To counteract this, I installed the Shopify app Sticky Add to Cart Button ($3.95 per month) and my new product page looked like this:

When creating this new product page, I always tried to consider my customers’ expectations: “If I clicked on this ad, what would I expect?”

This was tough for me to answer, especially since I’m not the target audience, but I felt confident that this new page could work.

But before I moved forward with the actual ads, I wanted to change one last part of my product page – I wanted to incorporate upsells.